“So you were there when it happened?”
“Well, here’s the thing,” Citra said for the second time. Then she took a deep breath and said, “It wasn’t an accident. I pushed you.”
“Ha!” said Rhonda, “I knew it! I knew someone pushed me!” At the time her parents had tried to convince her that it was unintentional. That someone had bumped her. Eventually she came to believe it, but in the back of her mind she always held on to a little bit of doubt. “So it was you!” Rhonda found herself smiling. There was victory in knowing that she hadn’t been crazy all these years.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” Citra said. “I’m really, really sorry.”
“So why are you telling me now?”
“Well, here’s the thing,” Citra repeated, like it was a nervous tick. “Being a scythe’s apprentice means I have to make amends for my . . . well, for my past bad choices. And so . . . I want to give you the chance to do the same thing to me.” She cleared her throat. “I want you to push me in front of a truck.”
Rhonda guffawed at the suggestion. She didn’t mean to; it just came out. “Really? You want me to throw you in front of a speeding truck?”
“Yes.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“And your scythe is okay with that?”
The scythe nodded. “I support Citra entirely.”
Rhonda considered the proposal. She supposed she could. How many times had there been someone in her life she wanted to dispose of—even just temporarily? Just last year she had come remarkably close to “accidentally” electrocuting her lab partner in science because he was such an ass. But in the end she realized that he’d get a few days vacation, and she’d have to finish the lab alone. This situation was different. It was a free revenge ticket. The question was, how badly did she want revenge?
“Listen, it’s tempting and all,” said Rhonda, “but I’ve got homework, and dance class later.”
“So . . . you don’t want to?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, I’m just busy today. Can I throw you under a truck some other time?”
Citra hesitated. “Okay . . .”
“Or better yet, maybe you can just take me out to lunch or something.”
“Okay . . .”
“Just next time, please give us some warning so you don’t freak out my mother.” Then she said good-bye, stepped inside, and closed the door.
“How bizarre . . . ,” said Rhonda.
“What was that all about?” her mother asked.
And since she didn’t want to get into it, Rhonda said, “Nothing important,” which irritated her mother, just as it was intended to.
Then she went back to the kitchen, where she found her ramen had gotten cold. Great.
? ? ?
Citra felt both relieved and humiliated at once. For years she had held onto this secret crime. Her gripe with Rhonda had been petty, as most childhood resentments are. It was the way Rhonda always spoke of her dancing as if she were the most talented ballerina in the world. Citra was in the same dance class, back in that magical childhood time when little girls nurtured the delusion that they were as graceful as they were cute.
Rhonda had led the pack in disabusing Citra of that delusion through eyeball rolls and exasperated exhales each time Citra took an imperfect step.
The push wasn’t premeditated. It was a crime of opportunity, and that one act had cast a shadow over Citra that she hadn’t even realized until she faced the girl today.
And Rhonda didn’t even care. It was water under a very old bridge. Citra felt stupid about the whole thing now.
“You realize that in the Age of Mortality, you would have been treated much differently.” Scythe Curie didn’t look at her as she spoke—she never looked away from the road when she was driving. Citra was still getting used to the odd habit. How strange to actually have to see the path of your journey in order to make it.
“If it was the Age of Mortality, I wouldn’t have done it,” Citra told her with confidence, “because I’d know she wouldn’t be back. Pushing her then would have been more like gleaning.”
“They had a word for it. ‘Murder.’”
Citra chuckled at the archaic word. “That’s funny. Like a bunch of crows.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time.” She did a quick maneuver to avoid a squirrel on the winding road. Then Scythe Curie took a rare moment to glance over at Citra, when the road ahead straightened. “So now the penance you’ve given yourself is to be a scythe, forever doomed to take lives as punishment for that one childhood act.”
“I didn’t give it to myself.”
“Didn’t you?”
Citra opened her mouth to answer, but then stopped. Because what if Scythe Curie was right? What if, deep down, Citra had accepted the apprenticeship with Scythe Faraday to punish herself for the crime only she cared about. If so, it was an unusually harsh judgment. Had she been caught, or had she confessed, her punishment would have been a short suspension from school, at most, plus a fine for her parents, and a stern reprimand. It would even have had an up side: Her schoolmates would have been afraid to cross her.
“The difference between you and most other people, Citra, is that another person would not have cared once that girl was revived. They would have simply forgotten about it. Scythe Faraday saw something in you when he chose you—perhaps the weight of your conscience.” And then she added, “It was that same weight that let me know you were lying in conclave.”
“I’m actually surprised the Thunderhead didn’t see me push her,” Citra said off-handedly. ?Then the scythe said something that began a chain reaction in Citra’s mind that changed everything.
“I’m sure it did,” she said. “The Thunderhead sees just about everything, what with cameras everywhere. But it also decides what infractions are worth the effort to address and which ones are not.”
? ? ?
The Thunderhead sees just about everything.
It had a record of practically every human interaction since the moment it became aware—but unlike in mortal days, that knowledge was never abused. Before the Thunderhead achieved consciousness, when it was merely known as “the cloud,” criminals—and even public agencies—would find ways into people’s private doings, against the law, and exploit that information. Every school child knew of the information abuses that nearly brought down civilization before the Thunderhead condensed into power. Since that time there had not been a single breach of personal information. People waited for it. People prophesized doom at the hands of a soulless machine. But apparently the machine had a purer soul than any human.
It watched the world from millions of eyes, listened from millions of ears. It either acted, or chose not to act on, the countless things it perceived.
Which meant that somewhere in its memory lurked a record of Scythe Faraday’s movements on the day his life ended.
Citra knew it was probably a pointless endeavor to track those movements, but what if Faraday’s demise was not an act of self-gleaning at all? What if he was pushed, just as Citra had pushed Rhonda all those years ago? But this wouldn’t have been a childish crime of the moment. It would have been cruelly premeditated. What if Faraday’s death was, to use the word Scythe Curie had taught her, murder?
* * *
As a young man, I marveled at the stupidity and hypocrisy of the mortal age. In those days, the purposeful act of ending human life was considered the most heinous of crimes. How ridiculous! I know how hard it is to imagine that what is now humanity’s highest calling was once considered a crime. How small-minded and hypocritical mortal man was, for even as they despised the enders of life, they loved nature—which, in those days, took every human life ever conceived. Nature deemed that to be born was an automatic sentence to death, and then brought about that death with vicious consistency.
We changed that.
We are now a force greater than nature.
For this reason, scythes must be as loved as a glorious mountain vista, as revered as a redwood forest, and as respected as an approaching storm.
—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Goddard